St Sylvesters GAA Club Malahide – Case Study

• they had no targeted communications system. Their membership was recorded manually. Doing targeted mail merges was very difficult and time consuming.
• they had no means of communicating special events in the bar with their members.
• Sales of Club Gear were recorded manually & they had little control over stock.
• There were many other issues that they didn’t realise they actually had until they had implemented the system and saw what could be done.

Applied Solution – Herbst Insight Accounting Software supplied by Customised IT Solutions

We found the flexibility of the Herbst Insight Software brilliant, particularly around what could be recorded on a member account. For example we were able to record lotto numbers, names in Irish, Parents names (for juveniles), date of birth and use this to show what team the player should be on, if they were on any committees, membership type, membership expiry.

We were then able to create our own grid views to give us critical info that previously we did not have.

For Example

• A list of member who had not paid the current years subscriptions. We could then at a click of a button send them a text, an email or be part of mail merge. We could also record on the members account automatically that this has been done so we could see the effectiveness of each type of reminder. Getting on top of the member was fundamental.
• List for each juvenile team which was driven by the members’ date of birth. Using restricted access we set up the system in such a way that each manager only saw the information for their own team.
• We could automate the playing membership lists for the county board.
• Send reminders to specific groups within the club i.e. the golf society of upcoming events.
• Communicate events in the bar with the adult membership only. We found the ability to remind people that a certain band was in the bar on a Saturday night very useful. When the texts went out the numbers through the doors on a Saturday night were hugely increased thus increasing bar sales.
• We could give remote access to the system to allow managers to dial in to send emails or sms to the players on their team. Using restricted access we set up the system in such a way that each manager only saw the information for their own team. We could easily show managers of their team a live position of the memberships received from their team alone.

Other benefits

From an accounts perspective we were able to integrate the Point of Sale system in the bar directly into the accounts package. We could see live info on how exactly the bar was doing.

We were able to split out our profit & loss account by section in the club i.e. Juvenile, Adult ladies, Adult Mens & then even go to team level to show exactly which teams were costing us most money. If the hurlers were breaking too many hurls we could see that on the face of the P & L & say to the manager of the team that he/she needed to get more sponsorship money in.

We were able to make sure that all club gear sales were put through the system & recorded properly. We got proper stock control of saw better margins coming through.

The biggest benefit that we saw though was in membership numbers & fees received. The built in CRM system gave us all the information that we needed to target those who had not paid. In the first year we recorded an increase of €8,000 and the following year €6,000. We have managed to maintain this increased level of revenue which paid for the system multiple times over.

See client testimonial